Is David Korten a pioneer of a
new economic order? He was born in
Longview, Washington in 1937 and was
awarded an MBA and
PhD from the
Stanford University
Graduate School of Business. He has taught on the Harvard Business
School’s MBA and doctoral programmes. But he is far more exceptional than his brilliant
academic career might indicate.
With David’s academic
background and business know-how, conventional wisdom might have thought it likely
that he would be a leader of some kind: perhaps a man destined to improve the
business performance of America. Conventional wisdom was indeed correct on this
point - but it is very unlikely it would have foreseen the nature of the
improvements that David would want to make:
“Wall Street generates money
in astonishing quantities through accounting tricks, financial bubbles, and
debt pyramids without producing anything of real value.”
From
Capitalism and the Common Good, David Korten, 2012.
If Wall Street (and other
financial markets) do not produce anything of real value than the legitimacy of
the whole financial sector is challenged. This would indeed herald a new
economic order. But where do David’s ideas come from? Are they sound?
It could be argued that
David’s early, post-Stanford career from 1959 was unduly influential upon his
young and passionate mind. He devoted himself to setting up business
schools in low-income countries such as Ethiopia. In the developing
world, David would certainly have seen the struggles, hardships and pain that
might have aroused his sympathy and turned him against the securities and
comforts of the American establishment. But he chose this career with the poor overseas
– something within him had already turned before he even left the USA.
There is no suggestion here
that David was in any way a latent Marxist; though he would have witnessed the
McCarthy communist accusations in the USA, that Second Red Scare of the early 1950’s. After
all, David was a business-studies student throughout that period.
But whatever resource,
insight, compassion, understanding or humanity the younger David possessed that
set him upon his life’s path, his later career consolidated his views. For 15
years from the late 1970s, David lived in South-east Asia and served as a Ford Foundation project specialist then as an Asia
regional advisor to the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID). He came to
understand the root causes of development failure in South-east Asia. He began to see that the economic policies of the developed
world including the USA and the UK were themselves the cause of global environmental
and social crises.
Perhaps David gets his ideas
by experiencing life on the outside, as it were, of the existing economic order.
He got to know the downside of existing economics but unlike the millions who
suffer in silence, David had the knowledge and skills to seek a solution.
Wherever his ideas came from, David
is now famous for promoting a new kind of economic order. In
Capitalism and the Common Good 2011, a
speech David gave at the University of Oregon, he identified two kinds of economy,
the existing and the emerging as follows:
The Existing Economy
“The greed-driven,
money-serving, corporate-ruled Wall Street Economy measures its success
exclusively by the financial profits it generates for the already rich. It
neither acknowledges nor accepts responsibility for the economic, social,
environmental, and political devastation it leaves in its wake.”
The Emerging Economy
“The democratic,
community-rooted, market-based, life-serving Main Street economies that
ordinary people are rebuilding across the nation and around the world measure
success by their contribution to securing adequate and meaningful livelihoods
for everyone in a balanced relationship to nature.”
David’s Emerging Economy is
based on common sense, business and economic knowledge, and wide experience. But
is there necessarily something else that David possesses? After all, how many
business leaders in the Existing Economy posses these self-same qualities and
they do not recognise the need for fundamental economic change?
What is that something else that
enables David to see a world that his fellows simple cannot see? After all, it
is that something else which means that David can see a new kind of economic
order emerging whilst others think he is, at the best, deluded.
Does that something else have
to do with epistemes, the possibilities of knowledge? An episteme change would
certainly explain why David can see a wholly different world from many of his contemporaries.
It is in the nature of episteme change that those with old knowledge
possibilities cannot deal with, cannot see and appreciate, the new (Foucault
1970).
Perhaps we are led to conclude
that David Korten’s view of economics is a consequence of his open-mindedness:
his innate ability to see changes for what they are, as they take place. If
this is the case then he is liberated: he deals with fresh facts untrammelled by
the economics of dogma.
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| David Korten |
References
Foucault, M. (1970). The Order
of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge.
